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Wōhūmríɂlan
Wōhūmríɂlan (wōhūmríɂla /wɔ:.hu:m.'riʔ.la/, lit. language of our people) was the language of the original language of the Ɂūmríɂlish people. It was spoken on the shores of the Mesoborean Sea, east of Toga. Due to uncertain circumstances, the Ɂūmríɂlish people split up and moved westward. The northwestern migrations led to the birth of the Early Togan culture while the southwestern migrations led to the birth of the Moujyti culture. Name Wōhūmríɂla comes from three words: wōɂ, incorporated form of wó language, ɂūm, incorporated form of the pronoun ɂû, and ríɂla people. Typology Wōhūmríɂlan is mostly SVO, only a few constructions violating this rule. It is strictly head-first and has no preference between prefixing, suffixing and prepositions, which are all roughly equally represented. Prefixing is mostly a matter of nouns, suffixing a matter of verbs and prepositions are used for syntactic relations and accurate locatives. It features a word category called "modifiers" which includes adjectives and adverbs. Their actual meaning change according to whether they are used with a noun or a verb and whether they are incorporated or not. They can be prefixed or partially reduplicated to indicate a variety of things (most often intensity, sometimes something completely different). It also features incorporation to various ends, for both nouns and verbs. For instance, noun + noun is used for inalienable possession while verb + noun is used for verbal adjectives. What it doesn't feature: overt plural marking, genders, distinct moods, aspects (they're all mashed together in modifiers). Phonology Consonants Vowels Vowels can be either short or long. In the latter case, they are marked with a macron, like so ō'. If the long vowel is also the stressed vowel, it is marked with a circumflex accent, like so 'ô. Stress Stress is completely unpredictable and its position may change the meaning of two words otherwise seemingly identical. It is marked with an acute accent, like so ó''', on short vowels. It is marked by a circumflex accent on long vowels (see above). In the case of incorporated words, the stress is lost through the transformation in their incorporative form. Stress can affect the phonetic properties of phonemes it affects or those it doesn't affect. For instance, reducing /y/ to /ʉ/ while not stressed is a feature of all northwestern daughter languages of Wōhūmríɂlan. Although it is very important to differentiate lexical items, stress is never used for grammatical purposes. Phonotactics A syllable can be composed according to the following formula: Allophony & Sandhi *ɂ''' + ɂ''' -> '''h; this process is why wōɂ + ɂūm gave wōhūm. Nominal morphology Wōhūmríɂlan's nouns have no inflection and no plural marking. They have a series of prefixes that acts as determiners. Noun incorporation, compounding and derivation are also treated in this section. Determiner prefixes These prefixes aren't obligatory if they can be inferred from context. Thus, the absence of prefix doesn't necessary mean the noun is indefinite. There are two classes of determiners, both being usable together, although an order is to be respected in such case. The articles are the first class of determiners; they are the first to be appended to the noun. : An example with a vowel-first word: : The quantifiers make up the second class and come before the articles: Some examples: : The following one implies a plurality of sons and that only some of them are referred to. The other some word, zuɂa, implies a singular noun and refers to a part of the object. : In the previous example, ɂūm is actually a possessive determiner and takes the article slot, although it is a special case of inalienable possession marking, which requires the incorporation of the possessor noun before the possessed noun, along with morphological changes to the possessor. In this instance, ɂūm is the incorporated form of ɂû, the first person pronoun. Possession has its own section and thus isn't treated along determiners. Last example: : A stacked example: : Verbal morphology The verb is made of 1 to 3 elements: the obligatory root, the tense suffix and the postposed verbal modifier. Roots The roots contain the semantic content of the verb, like to sleep in pzújaɂ. They always end in '-ɂ'. However, note that not all the words ending in '-ɂ' are verbal roots. Tenses There are four formal tense markers and a fifth one, unmarked. They are as follow: Examples of sentences : : : : Lexicon :See the Swadesh lists of Ɂūmríɂlic languages for more information; see Lexicon for the complete list There is a special vocabulary in Wōhūmríɂlan that is used exclusively by the shaman and her apprentices. As part of the shaman's role is to tell stories and record events, this special vocabulary appears in a consequent amount of cultural material. (Examples for latter) Category:Proto-Languages Category:Togan languages Category:Ɂūmríɂlic languages